1CHARLES BROCKDEN BROWN, POVERTY, AND THE BILDUNGSROMAN
Of native novels we have no great stock, and none good; our democratic institutions placing all the people on a dead level of political equality; and the pretty equal diffusion of property throughout the country affords but little room for varieties, and contrasts of character.
âJohn Bristed, The Resources of the United States of America (1818)
[Bristed] should have excepted from this censure the Wieland, Ormond, and Arthur Mervyn of C. B. Brown, which combine grandeur and simplicity in an extraordinary degree.
ââBristedâs America and her Resources,â Edinburgh Monthly Review (1819)
I am poor.
â Arthur Mervyn
In Ormond; or, The Secret Witness (1799) and Arthur Mervyn; or, Memoirs of the Year 1793 (1799, 1800), Charles Brockden Brownâthe late eighteenth-century U.S. novelist most celebrated by early nineteenth-century American writers and most studied by twentieth- and twenty-first-century criticsâtells the same story twice. At the outset of both novels, Brownâs protagonistsâConstantia Dudley and Arthur Mervyn, respectivelyâfall into âpoverty.â Having become âpoor,â these protagonists must sell their labor to others in order to acquire âsubsistence.â They become, then, members of late eighteenth-century Philadelphiaâs âlower sort.â While Constantia and Arthur eventuallyâand fortuitouslyâascend to property at the close of their respective novels, both Ormond and Arthur Mervyn are predominantly dedicated to narrating what âpovertyâ entails for their protagonists. To what end, this chapter asks, did Brownâa man who never wanted for money and was âentirely supported by his parents or extended family until he was thirty years oldâ1âwrite novels about young people who must negotiate material deprivation and economic precariousness in late eighteenth-century Philadelphia? And, moreover, to what end do Brownâs Philadelphia novels construe the fall into poverty as a âfortunateâ one?
To ask these questions, and thus to focus on Brownâs representation of economic subalternity, is to reveal a facet of his writing that has yet to be fully appreciated. Of course, that Brownâs novels, especially Arthur Mervyn, are âaboutâ early U.S. capitalism is widely acknowledged among scholars of early U.S. literature. As James Justus observes of Arthur Mervyn, in âno other novel before the Civil War are we so assaulted by the immediacy and pervasiveness of a commercial society.â2 The typical line of inquiry into Brownâs representation of capitalism in Arthur Mervyn situates Brown within the historical friction between a residual republicanism and an emergent liberalism. According to the republicanism-liberalism paradigm, late eighteenth-century economic transformations and the expansion of the market unleashed a conflict between a new culture of private economic ambition and an older ideal of âcivic virtueâ that celebrated self-sacrifice on behalf of the polity and for which âcommerceâ necessarily augured âcorruption.â âAmerica in the 1790s,â Teresa Goddu writes, âwas both buoyed by a liberal ideology that believed in the benefits of commerce and troubled by the vestiges of a civic republicanism that feared commerce was an infection.â3 Which is to say, late eighteenth-century U.S. writing about âcommerceâ registers a deep ambivalence, marked at turns both by liberal celebrations of making oneâs living by buying and selling goods and by republican critiques of the selfish dispositions that such livelihoods might foster. On the one hand, the market could be seen as a âcivilizingâ force.4 On the other hand, the market could be seen as the dissolvent of civic-mindedness.5 Thus the typical question put to Brownâs representation of capitalism is this: do his novels authorize commerce by extolling liberal individualism, or do they critique commerce by depicting liberal individualism as corrupt and corruptingâas incompatible with civic virtue?6
Yet, to ask whether Arthur Mervyn endorses liberal individualism or instead critiques it from the vantage of residual republicanism is to read Arthur Mervyn primarily as a meditation on economic activities that were largely the province of the property-owning class in the early United Statesârather than as a meditation on the condition of economic subalternity itself. Which is to say, though a number of scholars have explored what Arthur Mervyn might say about greed and financial speculation, we have not yet sufficiently attended to the significance of the fact that the protagonist of Arthur Mervyn must sell his labor and is thus not in fact a capitalistânot a merchant or speculator. Certainly, the world that Arthur inhabits is a capitalist one, but, as I will argue below, Arthurâs story is not a story of speculation or capitalist accumulation or even of an emergent capitalist ethos of acquisitive individualism rendered in biographical form. Rather, it is largely a story about being poor in a massively unequal society, just as Constantiaâs is.
What I seek to theorize, then, is how Brownâs Philadelphia novels, in narrating stories about the âpoor,â are weighing in on economic inequality and asymmetric labor relations in the early United States.7 Indeed, to examine how Brownâs Philadelphia novelsâ Arthur Mervyn, but also Ormondârepresent poverty in the early United States is, I would submit, to better understand precisely how an approval of economic inequality manifests itself in the novels of this unquestionably foundational early U.S. novelist. So, while a number of critics have argued that Arthur Mervyn links the commercial ethos of liberalism to fraud and deception and thereby tenders âa bitter, somber critique of late-eighteenth-century capitalism,â8 I want to argue nearly the opposite: that Arthur Mervyn, but also Ormond, represent poverty as potentially beneficial to individuals subjected to it and, by extension, work to ratify the inequality of which this poverty is a symptom.9
A focus on Brownâs representation of poverty, in addition to shedding new light on his literary practice in particular, also revises literary historical common sense about the kinds of narratives Americans told themselves in the early republic. While it is a commonplace that the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century discourse of American exceptionalism insisted that the United States had already escapedâor was destined imminently to escapeâthe poverty endemic to Europe, novels such as Ormond and Arthur Mervyn counter this exceptionalism with a deliberate celebration of class inequality in the United States. In Ormond and Arthur Mervyn, poverty exists in the United Statesâand it is good that it does.10
Brown was familiar, through his reading of William Godwin, with a strain of philosophy for which poverty was, to use Gavin Jonesâs apt words, âan ethical dilemmaâ that âprovokes questions of distributive justice.â11 Yet, while characters in Ormond and Arthur Mervyn at times broach questions of distributive justice, these novels do not finally lament economic inequality or demand its end. An indicator of the class politics of Brownâs Philadelphia novels is to be found in the fates of those characters that refuse to learn to submit to their own economic subalternity: these characters are villainsâand are punished, usually with death. In contrast to those characters that refuse to submit to economic subalternity, poor characters in Brownâs novels who do signal their consent to the unequal distribution of wealth in the United States are rewardedâand not just with wealthâin their respective stories.
These poor characters become protagonists in versions of the bildungsroman. Brown is usually understood as a writer of gothic fiction, but in Constantia and Arthur âone finds a dynamic unity in the heroâs image,â as Bakhtin writes of the protagonist of the bildungsroman; here, âchanges in the hero . . . acquire plot significance.â12 Yet, the bildungsroman is more than a novel in which âchanges in the hero . . . acquire plot significanceâ; rather, it is a form that works to reconcile âthe conflict between the ideal of self-determination and the equally imperious demands of socializationâ through a narrative of a young personâs âmaturation.â13 In Ormond and Arthur Mervyn, Brown reconciles an ideal of self-determination with socialization by inviting his readers to imagine subjection to poverty and free-subjectivity as, paradoxically enough, one and the same.14 For the narrators and the plots of these novels, poverty need not spell exploitation and oppression, but instead entails freedom and individual intellectual expansion. In Ormond and Arthur Mervyn, poverty itself provides the occasion for Constantia Dudleyâs and Arthur Mervynâs âintellectual improvementâ (since it increases their knowledge of the world and themselves); it allows these characters to practice âbenevolenceâ and heroism; and, it allows them to encounter extraordinary personages and expand their circles of friends.
By rewriting âpovertyâ as âfreedom,â Brownâs Philadelphia novels revise their momentâs governing discursive formations. Early Americans thought of poverty and freedom as fundamentally antithetical.15 Both republicanism and emergent liberalism equated personal autonomy with property ownership.16 âIt was an axiom of Enlightenment political thought,â writes Amy Dru Stanley, âthat persons who sold their laborâhowever voluntarilyâwere dependent, and therefore not fully autonomous or capable of exercising the virtue required of citizens.â17
Because Constantia and Arthur do âriseâ out of poverty, we might read Ormond and Arthur Mervyn as early instantiations of a nationalist ideology of class mobility. As Karen SĂĄnchez-Eppler contends, âNational ideologies of class promise that in the United States poverty, like childhood, is merely a stage to be outgrown.â18 Yet, because Brownâs Philadelphia novels invest in poverty as an essential stage of their protagonistsâ developments, they do not insist that the United States should one day outgrow poverty as a feature of its economic life. Alternatively, because of whom they permit to âriseâ out of poverty, we might read Brownâs novels as primarily working to imagine a wealthy class that deserves to be wealthy. This is the argument that Matthew Pethers has put forward about Ormond. For Pethers, Ormond is exemplary of what he names the âparabolic social mobility narrative.â In Ormond and a host of other novels published in the first decade of the nineteenth century, Pethers discovers a narrative form in which the ascent from poverty to wealth is, first, limited to characters who were initially wealthy, and, second, a matter not of a character accumulating wealth via work but instead a matter of Providenceâs recognition that this character has responded âvirtuouslyâ to poverty.19 Like Pethers, I also observe that the ascent from poverty to wealth in Ormondâbut also Arthur Mervynâis not about accumulating wealth via work so much as it is about an individual being bequeathed wealth: Brown does not tell stories of economic âbootstrapping.â Additionally, I also investigate the extent to which Brownâs fiction works to portray members of the propertied class as âmoral.â Yet, in contrast to Pethersâs account of the âparabolic social mobility narrative,â I am arguing that Brownâs Philadelphia novels primarily work not to link wealth with virtue but instead to legitimate the very existence of poverty by, again, aligning poverty with freedom and intellectual expansion.
Moreover, I want to suggest that Brownâs Philadelphia novels turn the representation of poverty into a source of pleasure for those who have not experienced poverty but instead read about it in the pages of his novels. Insofar as Ormond and Arthur Mervyn construct poverty as the precondition of positive, noneconomic transformation for their protagonists, poverty itself becomes the price of admission for narrative pleasureâfor captivating stories.
To exploit poverty on behalf of narrative pleasure in this fashion is a quintessentially anti-utopian gesture. Indeed, in the utopian world of Reynoldsâs Equality, A Political Romance (1802), the kind of stories that Brown offers in Ormond and Arthur Mervyn are ruled out from the start. The first half of Equality, as I explained in the introduction, paints a portrait of Lithconia, a society in which class inequality has been overcome. Yet, equality in Lithconia functions as an impediment to the production of stories. As Louis Marin has pointed out, âutopia knows nothing of time. . . . Utopia knows nothing of change.â20 In Lithconia, equality means an absence of conflict, and the absence of change is expressed as absolute social integration and normality. âThe period of the life of one man is employed nearly in the same manner as any other,â the narrator explains: âTo give the history, then, of one Lithconian, is to describe the manners of the nationâ (23). There are no adventuresâno trials and tribulationsâin Lithconia. The only âplotâ deserving of the name in Lithconia is the arrival of an outsider, the textâs narrator. For Charles Brockden Brown the novelist, this political dreamâwhere not even the young can drop into povertyâwould make two of his novels essentially impossible. There has to be poverty for Brownâs young protagonists to fall into; there must be economic inequality to tell the stories that he does.
âTHE ABSURD AND UNEQUAL DISTRIBUTION OF WEALTH AND POWERâ
According to the exceptionalist imagination, the European who comes to America leaves behind an exquisitely detailed variety of rank, along with the extreme divergence of wealth and poverty. This exceptionalism finds its most cogent expression in Letter 3 of CrĂšvecoeurâs 1782 Letters from an American Farmer, the salient moment for my purposes here which I want to quote once more. âHere are no aristocratical families,â the invented Farmer James writes, âno courts, no kings, no bishops, no ecclesiastical dominion, no invisible power giving to a few a very visible one, no great manufactures employing thousands, no great refinements of luxury. The rich and the poor are not so far removed from each other as they are in Europeâ (67). In contrast to Europe, Farmer James explains, the United States is defined by a âpleasing uniformity of decent competenceâ (67). In the absence of Europeâs political structures and the presence of Americaâs natural abundance, the American becomes a ânew manâ that has escaped from âvoluntary idleness, servile dependence, penury, and useless laborâ and has been ârewarded by ample subsistenceâ (70).
But by the end of the eighteenth century, this promise of âcompetenceâ and âample subsistenceâ for individuals of European ancestry was already being undercut by the paradoxes of capitalist accumulation, especially in mid-Atlantic cities like Philadelphia. As Billy G. Smith has documented, âOne group of Philadelphians became rich as their neighbors grew poor during much of the second half of the century.â21
âThe vast majority of laboring people were without property,â Smith explains, and their âpositions at the bottomâ of the economic ladder âmore permanentâ than just-so stories of mobility suggest (133, 149). Wealth did not âtrickle downâ to workers, who led precarious and anxiety-wracked lives (149). âCompetenceâ and âample subsistenceâ were anything but guaranteed in Philadelphia at the end of the eighteenth century.
For some late eighteenth-century political economists and philosophers, moreover, economic inequality was at odds with Enlightenmentâor with what Immanuel Kant called the ability âto use oneâs understanding without gui...